The Embarrassment of Over-Exposure

Well that was quite the chore. In the hope of quickly boosting the volume of material on my brand new blog I went about cataloguing all the mentions of my health battles in the various letters I’ve sent to family & friends over the years. I took everything from single paragraph snippets to multipage rants and created individual blog posts for each and uploaded them to the blog. I also found several letters and facsimiles I’d written to various doctors treating my assorted conditions over the years, converted them to blog posts and uploaded them to the blog as well. By the time I was finished I had 26 separate posts on my blog ready and waiting for eager eyes to consume. You’ll probably be bored by the fifth one.

I have no intention of turning my blog into solely a Sarcoidosis blog or a personal health blog. I remain niche-free. This was simply the first batch of material I was confident I could put on the blog quickly so that there was a little meat there; programming is king. In fact, I had hoped to simply upload all these posts as an archive, so to speak, without each post being published individually to the main page. Unfortunately, this was not possible with the blog software. So, as you’ll see, all these health related posts are presented as if I was on a cocaine-fueled, boring blog binge the past couple days.

Together these posts provide what I feel is a fairly accurate account of my twelve year battle with what would eventually be diagnosed as Pulmonary Sarcoidosis plus the myriad other chronic health problems that have tormented my body. I wanted to do this because I felt it provided a useful summary of my experience. I found this endeavour a revealing experience for myself and hope it proves equally valuable to other Sarcoidosis sufferers who discover my blog. Not sure what it’ll be for the rest of you; eye-opening, perhaps, uncomfortable, most likely.

Your discomfort will stem directly from my embarrassment. My little endeavour to archive my past health-related correspondence exposed something that I’d never really recognized about myself previously. Holy smokes I am whiny! Seriously, that was humiliating reading all those letters I wrote, especially those to doctors. Wow! I sounded far more desperate in those letters than in the ones I sent to my family and friends. Those close to me saw a mostly edited-for-family-consumption version of my plight. The doctors, lucky souls, got the raw, no-holds-barred, panic-in-the-streets version.

Hey, I’m not proud. There is something frightening about not knowing what is going on with one’s body. It may be a fairly minor affliction or it may be a dire disease, but it’s the unknowing that drives sufferers of either to the edge. It may come across as whiny or ridiculous or possibly even verging on insane, but it’s certainly genuine. Hopefully in my case it reads as more than the mad ranting of a borderline hypochondriac worrying about every miniscule or peculiar symptom that manifested in his body. Perhaps sharing my fears and confusion and frustrations in such a raw fashion will help others dealing with similarly difficult periods in their life. It’s not every day you see someone expose their emotions like a nudist colony jumping on trampolines.

With this project now complete, I (and you) can return to regularly scheduled programming which will hopefully be of a far more varied and interesting nature than solely health related posting. Kind of like when the Olympics are over and the shows you actually want to watch return.